Peter Robbins makes his third appearance on the program, and on the heels of the untimely death of Budd Hopkins, we talk about his friendship with Hopkins and insights into working with people who claim abduction by non-human entities. We started with an in-depth examination of Robbins’ own sighting and subsequent repression of the troubling memory until he was reminded of it in the mid 1970s by his sister, who was there and had an apparent abduction experience.
While there are certainly many troubling issues in UFO abduction research, I do not personally have all the data and experience of someone like Peter Robbins to be able to come to a solid conclusion about the way it has been conducted in the last 30 years, although I have been occasionally critical of it in the past. Peter addressed some of the charges leveled at Hopkins concerning the treatment of apparent abductees, protocols for interviews and hypnosis sessions and guarding against bias from both the researcher and the subjects.
Peter brought up a new case he’s been working on involving a security guard at a prison in the southwest and his sighting of a massive (100-yard or more) black, disc-shaped object which silently appeared and then disappeared in the night sky. Peter has promised to ask the witness if he would appear on the program for a short interview.
We also discussed the problem of fundamentalist thinking and how it pervades the skeptical community, UFO researchers, religion and politics. This led to a segment about compassion and how we should conduct our lives to do the most good for others and ourselves.
The theme of the program is probably best summed up as: “As much as you can, withhold judgment for as long as possible and keep your emotions in check.”
Robbins’ paper that is referred to during the program, Politics, Religion and Human Nature: Practical Problems and on the Path Toward Official UFO Acknowledgment can be downloaded by clicking on the title.
Photo credit: ICAR.
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